Go West, Young Women! (ISBN 0-06-027151-5) and Phoebe's Folly (ISBN 0-06-027153-1) list for $14.95 each in hardback. They are also available in paper for $4.50 each. Codes for paperback copies are Go West, Young Women! (ISBN 0-06-440495-1) and Phoebe's Folly (ISBN 0-06-440496- X). To order the books, use the on-line order form or call Children's Literature at 1-800-469-2070.

SUMMARY:
   Phoebe Brown (12) and her sister Amelia (17) are journeying West with their parents along the Oregon Trail in 1846. Book One, Go West, Young Women! follows them from New England to Fort Laramie in present-day Wyoming. Book Two, Phoebe's Folly, continues the remainder of the journey to Oregon City itself. Along the way a buffalo hunting accident kills a majority of the male members of their wagon train. The women of the train must band together, learn their strengths, and gain resolve in the process of completing the monumental trek.

REVIEWS:
"Very enjoyable . . . Kathleen Karr does a good job of communicating the sense of hope and adventure, the details of life on the trail, and the problems and hardships that plagued those courageous enough to venture across the country in rickety wagons. I'm of the opinion that we need many more heroines as funny, brave, clearsighted, and determined as Phoebe, and I can't wait to find out what she does in-and to-Oregon." -Karen Cushman

"A good adventure tale by Karr and a real consciousness-raiser to boot." -Kirkus Reviews

"Phoebe is a likable, spunky heroine who will attract a loyal following." -Booklist

PRE-READING:
Discuss what the United States was like in the early 1840's, particularly in New England and the Middle Atlantic states, where most of the emigrants for the Oregon Country originally lived. Other topics to consider:

• The Mexican War (1846-48), the immediate cause of which was the annexation of Texas. The long-term causes included the concept of "Manifest Destiny" which fueled the U.S. desire to also acquire California.
• President James K. Polk (in office 1845-1849). Among the "four great measures" he campaigned under for president were settlement of the Oregon boundary dispute with Great Britain (Democrats used the slogan "54-40 or Fight,") and the acquisition of California. By working fourteen hour days, seven days a week, Polk achieved these measures. Unfortunately, the work so exhausted him that he died shortly after leaving office.
• Popular culture of the period: Listen to Stephen Foster's "Oh, Susannah," and discuss why it became the theme song of westering emigrants.
• Talk about New England mill towns such as Lowell, Massachusetts. Discuss why they opened the age of the Industrial Revolution in America. What would it feel like to work twelve and half hours a day, six days a week, surrounded by the chaos of dangerous, clattering machines and air filled with cotton fibers? How would it feel to be sent from your farming home at the age of nine or ten to live in regulated dormitories filled with young ladies?
• What of the many Native American tribes whose territories the wagon trains crossed? Why were these tribes at first friendly to the interlopers? (E.g., Curiosity, trading possibilities.) As the stream of emigrants quickly turned into a river within a few years, try to understand why the tribes' initial cordiality turned to fear and then aggression as they watched first their grazing lands, then their food (buffalo), and finally the very land itself disappearing before their eyes.
• What of women's rights? How much of a voice did women have in decisions their fathers or husbands made for them? What choices were available to young ladies of this period other than marriage? (Amelia Brown desperately wants to become a writer, but is frightened of displeasing her father. Miss Simpson and Miss Prendergast have both chosen the vocation of teaching-how has this affected their private lives?)

ACROSS THE CURRICULA:

Social Studies:

Why did the pioneers go West?

• Much is written about the trek itself, but little is said about the reasoning behind the decision thousand of eastern families made to uproot themselves from everything they knew and were comfortable with in their lives. The Brown family leaves New England for two specific reasons:
     1) Papa Brown's scrappy Massachusetts soil has finally worn out. He is a farmer, and the accounts of free land in the Oregon Country ("man-tall grass green four seasons, sprouting from loam a yard thick,") are irresistible.
     2) The Brown sisters are frightened of the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts. Older sister Amelia has already spent six months in back-breaking, limb-chewing, soul-deadening labor in these mills to help support her family. Younger sister Phoebe is petrified with fear that her father will send her off to the mills next. To these sisters, even a two- thousand mile trek by wagon seems a far, far better thing.
• Other families on the wagon train leave for political reasons, especially the idea of Manifest Destiny. This was the doctrine (popular in the first half of the nineteenth century) that the United States had the right and duty to expand its territory and influence throughout North America. In the early 1840's the Oregon Territory was still being disputed between the United States and Great Britain. It was believed that if a sufficient number of American immigrants settled on these lands, the chances were more favorable that the Territory would become permanent U.S. property. In point of fact, this is what did happen.

Were women truly in demand out West?

• In its May issue of 1846, the Scientific American stated:
     It is urged upon emigrants to Oregon to take wives with them. There is no supply of the article in that heathen land.
     In point of fact, there were women already in the West. These were, of course, Native Americans. Wilderness men in the Oregon Territory had been marrying Indian women for decades. By 1800 Mexican women were being sent by the Spanish colonial government of Mexico north to the province of California as marriage fodder for the men working there. But the first white, Anglo-Saxon woman did not arrive west of the Rockies until Narcissa Whitman journeyed to what is now Walla Walla, Washington, with her missionary husband Marcus in 1836.
     John McLoughlin, the factor (or boss) of the Hudson Bay Company's Fort Vancouver, was himself married to an Indian woman. McLoughlin was responsible for recommending that more eastern women move west. He strongly believed they would be a civilizing factor in the wilderness. And yes, there were lots of men in the Oregon Territory still single and anxious to take on eastern brides.

Language Arts:

People talked differently in the 1840's than they do now. These novels reflect some of those differences. The characters sometimes speak more formally than we are used to speaking. Quite often, they use bigger, fancier words. All of this was the result of how people normally lived in that period:

• Families were a strong unit within the community, and holding together each community was its church. In a time before television and radio and computers, people used their churches as gathering places and social centers, as well as places of religious worship.
• Because of this central role religion held in their lives, the Bible was used as a teaching tool for learning how to read. The King James version of the Bible-written while Shakespeare was producing his plays-was the edition used. The King James Bible was, and is, one of the finest pieces of poetic literature extant in the English language. Thus, nineteenth century Americans were steeped in flowing, ornate words. They used these words, and the sentence structure of the Bible, naturally. The art of oratory (speechmaking) was another natural extension of this. Giving-and listening to- speeches was a prime entertainment of the times.

Math:

Study a map of the Oregon Trail. Break down the number of miles between logical camping sites each night. From the quality of the terrain, decide how many miles a wagon hauled by four oxen could logically have traveled in one day (anywhere from less than half a mile for a tedious river crossing, to eight or ten miles when the oxen were thirsty in the desert, to a maximum of fifteen miles over the flat, grassy prairies.)

   How much money would a family need to make the trip? Estimate the costs for the following supplies, per person, for the journey. You can make up prices, even based on current ones. Period statistics are difficult to find. We do know, however, that in 1846 Fort Laramie was charging $l.00 a pint for coffee, $1.50 a pint for sugar, and $.50 a pint (16 ounces, or half a pound) for flour-prices which were considered highway robbery.

-wheat flour: 200 pounds
-corn meal: fifty pounds
;-hard tack (dry biscuits): a barrel
-dried fruit (to ward off scurvy): one bushel
-bacon: fifty pounds
-a milk cow
-salt
-sugar
-coffee
-tea
-a gun, powder, and shot

Don't forget to throw in a wagon and oxen!

WHY I WROTE THESE BOOKS:

   I love American History, particularly events that took place in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The saga of westering pioneers struck me as an epic subject. I wanted to know what it actually felt like to trek across thousands of miles of "The Great American Desert" day after monotonous day. Fifteen miles a day tops, if one was lucky and the wagon didn't break down, or the oxen didn't sicken, or . . .

   I dragged my husband and children out to the Oregon Trail. From Independence, Missouri, all the way to Oregon City, Oregon, we followed the original trail. We camped on it, hiked on it, and found every major wagon stopping point and "landmark" along the way. We studied the names and messages scratched into rocks. We scrambled along the banks and among waterfalls of the great Snake and Columbia Rivers. We talked to descendants of Native American tribes who once populated these lands.

   After that experience settled into my mind, and after I'd read most of the existing period accounts written by actual emigrants of the Trail, I knew I had to write about these people myself. I wanted to express the hardship, yes, but I also wanted to show the humor of real human beings. "The Petticoat Party" series is the end result. All of the historical situations, all of the locations are absolutely true. Every mile traveled by my characters has been worked out on a vast chart of the original Trail.

   What I chose to add that was different was a humorous, feminist interpretation of the experience. My starting premise was to take a group of women who really weren't anxious to pull up stakes and head West. They did it only because they were forced to by their marriage vows of obedience-or because it was a lesser evil than, for example, working in the Lowell mills. I've tried in these books to make a little time machine, to recreate what it was really like on the Oregon Trail-or what it could have been like.

OTHER BOOKS BY KATHLEEN KARR

It Ain't Always Easy
Oh, Those Harper Girls!
Gideon and the Mummy Professor
The Cave
In the Kaiser's Clutch
Spy in the Sky